The Extra Mile

12

Pillar Six – Harnessing Talent

We are told that we are in the middle of a ‘war for talent’. Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones and Beth Axelrod famously identified this in their Harvard Business Review articles of 1999–2001 and their subsequent book.⁹⁷ Our contention is that, while talent is crucial, it is nowhere near so scarce as we are led to believe. We are not diminishing the importance of talent – on the contrary, engagement is critically concerned with enabling it to flourish – but we believe that the way to win the ‘war’ is not to treat talented people like counters on a draughts board that have to be captured, but to discover and use the latent talent you already have. In other words, to engage it. Put simply, the ‘war for talent’ ...